by Lis Lucassen
“I can already feel my arteries clogging up,” Dan said next to her.
“Oh, shut up.” She popped a bit of cheese-sauce-chips-onion cluster into her mouth and closed her eyes. Back home, she’d miss these nachos most of all. “Best food on the island. I wish they had a restaurant serving this stuff in my neighborhood.”
“So where is your neighborhood?”
She told Dan where she lived, and miraculously he turned out to know the little town in the north of their country. He even lived pretty close to her – a half-hour drive away…
26
Lynn
“Wow. You did survive after all.” Lynn gestured at Dan’s empty plate. She herself had given up trying to polish off her own plate after shoveling down three quarters of its contents. If she ate one more bite, she’d burst at the seams. And she suspected she wouldn’t be the first victim the tortillas had ever made due to overeating.
Dan gulped down another couple swigs of wine before handing the bottle to her. She followed his example and tanked down a few gulps as well. In the meantime, Dan was clearing away their plates and piled them on top of the tray that was on the floor next to the bed. He joined her on the mattress.
She wasn’t sure she was happy with his close proximity – especially now that she had nothing to distract herself with. “Now what?” The words had left her lips before she fully realized.
Dan shot her a sideways look and his brown eyes sparkled. “How about a game?”
Lynn crossed her arms. “Absolutely not.”
“Chicken. You don’t even know what game I was going to suggest.”
Her body responded to all the insinuations her head and heart immediately started to make. Lynn pressed her spine against the headboard. She didn’t want to think back to the way Dan’s fingers had caressed her. How his lips had set her skin on fire.
And how his jackass-act afterward had extinguished every last spark simmering within her.
She wouldn’t allow herself to get lost like that again, reborn Lynn or not. It wasn’t worth the terrible feeling of rejection.
“So?” Her curiosity beat her fear. All those times Esmee had called her scaredy-pants, had known exactly which buttons to push… she realized Dan was doing the same thing. It felt familiar and strangely bizarre at the same time. With Dan, everything was different, because he was different. And the same.
“Truth, Lie, or Dare.” The half-grin on his face only brought out the sparkle in his eyes more.
“I’ll pass.” Lynn didn’t know the game, although she suspected that it was some kind of tweaked version of Truth or Dare. One of Esmee’s favorite pastimes at the many parties she’d dragged Lynn to. It always ended badly. Always. The last time they’d played it was living proof of that. Esmee and Rodney had ended up fighting. Rodney had pushed Esmee against the wall – hard. The awful memory almost forced the nachos back up her throat, pressing painfully against her esophagus.
“Oh, come on. I’ll even allow you to go first,” Dan insisted.
She shook her head resolutely. “I said no.”
“So…” Dan fell silent, then gave her the wine bottle. “Dare: bottoms up.”
She snatched the bottle from his hand and put it to her mouth. Before she well and truly realized what she was doing, she’d downed the remaining wine. In her head, the memories began to swim around like drunken, helpless castaways at once, fighting to keep their heads above water. But she let them all sink to the bottom of her ocean of wine. She didn’t need them. It was nice not having to listen to them for a change.
“Dare: ransack the mini-bar.” The words seemed to come from afar, and Lynn didn’t even know she’d said the words herself until Dan rolled off the bed and opened the door of the small fridge. Again, he sat down next to her, dumping the eight little bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka in her lap.
Lynn expected a new assignment, but Dan shook his head as though he’d read her mind. “Truth or Lie: I once downed an entire bottle of vodka and drank myself into a coma so they had to take me to the hospital.”
Ah – so this was how Dan’s version of the game worked. She had to say whether what he said was true or not. “And if I guess right, what’s in it for me?”
Dan sighed. “You don’t know the rules? Okay. If you guess right, I need to drink from one of these lovely, cute little bottles, but if you guess wrong, you have to drink.” He pointed to the miniatures. “Admittedly, it’s not much, but my guess is you can’t really hold your liquor anyway.”
“Hm.” She refused to admit he was right.
“So? Truth or Lie?”
Lynn studied his face. Dan showed her a poker face – his brown eyes didn’t tell her anything, and neither did the slight smile pulling up the corners of his mouth until a small dimple appeared in his right cheek.
“Lie,” she finally decided after several minutes of silence.
“Drink up.” He stroked the bottles with his fingers before picking one and unscrewing the cap.
“You’re joking,” she said as she sniffed the liquor. Colorless, but definitely not odorless. She took a small sip, then caught Dan wearily shaking his head and took another, bigger sip. The bottle was half-empty after her second attempt.
“Two years ago, a friend of mine stole a bottle of vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet. At the time, it seemed like a cool idea to finish it all the way. Only, my buddy was already so sick from drinking all the beer we’d bought in the supermarket that I decided to help him and do a bottoms-up myself. When I stopped breathing, my girlfriend called 911.” He shrugged. “Pretty dumb, huh.”
The story sounded vaguely familiar. She thought a group in one of the higher grades in school had done the same thing. One of them had been in the hospital for over a week. She wondered what he was like as a high school student, in everyday surroundings. He had a girlfriend, apparently. The mention of his girlfriend suddenly hit her. Not that it mattered. Not really…
“Truth or Lie: I once kissed a girl.” Why that was the first thing she thought of was a mystery to her. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she wanted to somehow shock him just as much as he’d shocked her.
Something in Dan’s eyes changed. “Lie.”
She handed him the half-empty miniature.
“No shit.”
“It was a dare.”
“Ah. So?”
“So, what?”
Dan kept quiet, his eyes taking in her face. “You liked it?”
She had to rack her brain to access the memory. It had been during Esmee’s birthday party – her eighteenth. And last birthday. They’d been sitting in a circle, and Rodney had given Esmee a dare. Esmee had laughed and picked Nina, who’d dutifully played along. And they’d all had a good laugh about it afterward. It had triggered Rodney’s interest in Esmee, and that was exactly what her cousin had aimed for.
“Well?” Dan egged her on. He was playing with the bottle, rolling the neck between his thumb and index finger.
Lynn caved and pulled the bottle from his hand to drink the rest of the vodka. Dan threw his head back and laughed loudly. “Hah! I knew it.”
“Shut up.” The alcohol buzzed through her veins.
“Okay, okay. I’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself.” He pulled up his knees and looped his arms around his legs. “Go on.”
“Truth or Lie: I always sleep with my socks on.”
Dan laughed again. “That’s an easy one. Truth.” He handed her another miniature bottle, this one containing whiskey. He’d already uncapped it.
The booze burned down her throat and her mouth creased with distaste. Tears stung her eyes. “How did you…” Before Lynn had the chance to finish her question, Dan slipped his hand under her pillow and pulled out a pair of pink, terrycloth socks.
“Dare: sleep without socks tonight.” He stuffed the socks in his pants pocket and grabbed the other bottle of whiskey, which he drank in one go. Hers was still half-full, and she couldn’t bear to think about drinking one more drop. T
he alcohol seemed to hit her with some delay, much like your stomach telling you to stop eating only ten minutes after you’ve had enough, when it’s already way too late. Inside her minds, secrets, common sense, and reckless thoughts warred for a number-one spot. All doors seemed to be wide open, all locks broken.
“Dare: go to sleep wearing my socks tonight.” She frowned, knowing she wanted to add something to that. “Oh, and take a picture as proof.”
Dan laughed, and the sound worked like a catalyst. It wasn’t just the booze – Dan seemed to take all her inhibitions away. Lynn only realized how potentially dangerous that was after she’d drank the last bit of whiskey.
“Truth or Lie: I was witness to a murder,” she said.
Dan sat up, the smile slipping off his face. At once, she wanted to take the words back and say it was a lie, of course. Panic droned through her body like a vespiary, buzzing and stinging. She scratched her arms in an attempt to get rid of the feeling. Dan leaned into her and grabbed her hands, pushed them downward into her lap. Red welts left by her fingernails appeared on her upper arms.
“Jesus. Lynn.” His eyes brimming with concern made everything so much worse.
“Truth,” she whispered.
27
Dan
Lynn was lying on her side, her face turned toward him. After her confession, she hadn’t said much else. He’d tried to find out what had happened exactly, but when he’d seen the panic in her eyes at his questions, he’d shut his mouth.
Dan knew the stress of being forced to talk about things you didn’t want to discuss first-hand. So he refused to do it to someone else. Especially not to her.
Now Lynn had drifted off to sleep, slumped back against the headboard at first, then shifting into a more comfortable position. Her face looked relaxed. The crease between her eyebrows had disappeared and the corners of her mouth were slightly upturned.
He wondered what it was she was dreaming about.
He wondered about all kinds of things.
Why it was so easy for him to open up to her about things he wasn’t proud of. About Timo, for example, and the crazy stunts they’d pulled way back when. It seemed like a lifetime ago that he last thought of Timo and their friendship with fondness in his heart. How it was possible that Lynn unwittingly took the dark edges off his memories, enabling him to relive those moments without a bitter aftertaste. He didn’t know why. Maybe it wasn’t even because of her, but because of this vacation. The change of scenery, seeing all the familiar places on the island and the history that connected him to this place.
Dan sighed, sinking his head a bit further down into the pillows. He knew he should get up, go to his own room, and grab a few hours of sleep there. But he was still too restless because of Lynn’s confession. The argument with his parents that had caused him to visit her here suddenly seemed so trivial. He couldn’t even remember what it had been about, exactly. He just remembered they’d been pushing him to make hard choices, as usual.
What did he think the future held in store for him after graduation? Speaking of which, he had to realize that it wouldn’t come easy – that he’d missed too much to just wing it this year without actually opening his books. And the fact that he’d be attending a different high school after the summer break would make things even harder. Why was he so insistent to leave his old school? At least the teachers knew about his history there.
Thank goodness they no longer referred to whatever was wrong with his body as ‘disabilities’. The doctor had made that perfectly clear to them. Physically, he was fit. Of course he could opt for another operation in the future, get plastic surgery to partially cover up his scars, and he should always be mindful of infections, but technically, his body had fully healed.
Healed…
The itch demanded his attention. He rolled up his right sleeve and ran the tips of his fingers along the rough, bumpy skin. Lynn turned around. At once, he stopped scratching his skin and yanked his sleeve down. Lynn had inched closer to him, her hand on the mattress in the space between them, palm upturned and fingers relaxed and slightly crooked. He ran his thumb over the palm of her hand, moving toward her wrist. Softly, so the contact wouldn’t rouse her from sleep. He moved onto his side and slid down so his face was inches away from Lynn’s. He covered her hand with his, entwining his fingers with Lynn’s.
She sighed. A soft, contented sound. Dan closed his eyes and listened to her even breathing. It turned into a rhythm pulling him along until another sound rattled him from sleep – an insistent knock on the door.
28
Lynn
The pounding sound woke her up. At first, she thought that it was her head that she heard hammering. But the thudding continued, even when she used her pillow to cover her ears.
At long last, it stopped, but then voices drifted through the door, one of them soft yet adamant, the other loud and angry. Someone said her name.
There was no point ignoring the sounds any longer, so Lynn pulled the pillow off her head and rolled over to the edge of the bed. Her eyes seemed to be glued shut. When she finally opened them to a crack, her heart skipped a beat. Dan was in her room, standing face to face with Steve who was still partly on the threshold, one foot outside the door.
“I said it’s none of your business.” Dan spoke calmly, but the edge to his voice told Lynn that he was close to flying off the handle.
“Lynn?” Steve popped his head around Dan’s shoulder. She waved at him half-heartedly. “You okay?”
She nodded and wanted to get up from the bed, but a wave of nausea hit her full-force. The only thing she could manage to do was lie there and take short, even breaths. After a few seconds, she’d pulled herself together enough to answer Steve’s question, albeit in a staccato voice. “I’m. Fine.”
“You sure?” Steve tried to step into the room, but Dan blocked his way.
“Yep. Sure. See you.” She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled through her nose, then exhaled through her mouth. “In. A bit.”
“Bye.” Dan slammed the door shut in Steve’s face, whose last look was that of a Jehovah’s witness considering sticking his foot in the door before changing his mind for the better.
Dan walked over to her and sat down on the edge of the mattress. “You feeling sick?”
She just nodded.
He disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a glass of water and her toothbrush. “It’ll help if your mouth feels fresh.” He waited for her to sit up, then handed her the glass and the brush. Lynn was about to thank him when another few thuds on the door interrupted her words.
“You want me to…?”
Lynn nodded and Dan got up to open the door again. She half-expected Steve to be there to make another attempt to check up on her, but the visitor wasn’t for her. The person at the door turned out to be Stan Mertens. Silently, father and son stood there facing each other, both exploding into agitated rants at the same time.
“Goddammit, Daniel! What the hell were you thinking…”
“Dad, I’m sorry, I fell asleep here and…”
The slap surprised Lynn just as much as it did Dan. And Stan Mertens himself, it would seem. He dropped the hand he’d used to hit his son with a pained expression on his face.
“When will this end, Daniel? Your mother has gotten herself into a state. We thought…” The elderly man shook his head, seemingly growing ten years older in the span of five seconds. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his linen pants and turned around. “I expect you back in your room within ten minutes.”
Lynn stared after his retreating figure, his back slightly hunched and his head hanging. Her nausea had miraculously disappeared. As fast as she could, she kicked off the sheets tangled around her feet and got up. She left the toothbrush and glass of water on the nightstand.
Dan was still standing in the doorway. He hadn’t moved since his father had hit him. Could it be… A horrible image went through her mind. Dan, taking off his shirt, the bruises and contusions on
his skin silent testimonies of something unspeakable…
Her voice seemed to have dropped down to her stomach. “Dan? I…” The fact she’d regained the power of speech again sadly didn’t mean she also knew what to say. Lynn wanted to put her hand on his shoulder, wanted to fling her arms around him and hold him close, but her hand hovered above his shoulder without coming down.
You can’t touch me.
His words from before rung in her ears. She hugged herself instead. “Dan?”
At last he turned toward her. “I gotta go.”
It sounded like a question. Lynn nodded. “Yeah, you do.” She looked at his face. One cheek was redder than the other. He was already out the door by the time she found the courage to ask him: “Dan… does he beat you… more often?”
He was walking down the corridor in a way that reminded her of his father – back hunched and head hanging. Abruptly, he halted. “No. Never,” he replied without turning around. “Never.”
29
Dan
His parents’ voices battered his eardrums. His mom, telling him in shrill, tear-stained words that she can’t understand how he could be so inconsiderate. His dad, refusing to look at him but agreeing with his wife’s verdict time and time again. How it was Dan’s fault that he was at the end of his rope right now.
And Jason, standing there silently and staring right past him. As if he’d turned invisible.
“It can’t go on like this. I can’t go on like this.” His mother took a raspy breath and got up from the bed. “As soon as we get home you’re going into therapy. Serious therapy, Daniel. I’ll have you…” She sighed, seeking support against the wall. “I’ll have you institutionalized if need be.”
A strange sort of resignation colored her voice. Dan’s gaze swerved from his mother to his father. They’d played the therapy card before, but they’d never made good on their threats. This time, though, it was different. When this was actually the one time they had no reason to worry about him at all.